Clean-up time: Land managers, trail groups facing big mess in the forests after December storms

There's no way to know exactly how many trees fell in the forest over the past few months, regardless of whether they made a sound.

But those who lug saws into the woods to clear roads and trails each year know one thing for sure: There's a lot of work to do.

An atmospheric river followed by strong winds hammered forests from Montana to the Cascades in December. Rain and snow led to swollen rivers that washed out roads and trails, prompting closures that will last longer than anyone would like. The winds that followed were clocked at north of 60 mph in some places - more than enough to topple trees. A few months later, another round of windstorms hit.

Trees went down across an area so large that the best survey tool was an airplane. Jason Jerman, a silviculturist at the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, said at least two fixed-wing planes took flights over parts of the Panhandle to get a sense of the damage. What he knows now is far from being a complete picture, but he has some rough estimates.

Whole stands laid down flat in the Fishhook and Sisters creek drainages south of Avery, Idaho, Jerman said, covering an estimated 1,200 acres. At Lookout Pass Ski Area, a few hundred acres of trees are down. There's a roughly 30-acre patch down at the mouth of Prichard Creek, where it meets the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River.

Close to 200 acres of trees fell at the popular English Point Recreation Area on the north shore of Hayden Lake. Among the carnage is one of Jerman's favorite trees: an ancient ponderosa pine with a trunk nearly 4 feet in diameter.

"It ripped that thing right out of the ground," Jerman said.

Blowdown happens every year. Wind and gravity are always working on trees. But Jerman said the scale and reach of the damage this year is unlike anything he's seen in 22 years with the Forest Service.

"This was all over the place," Jerman said. "From the Salmon River north over into Montana, Washington, Oregon ... It was bad."

Some areas were largely spared, such as the Colville National Forest in northeast Washington. Some damage was taken care of quickly. At Mount Spokane State Park, volunteers from the Spokane Nordic Association cleared more than 200 trees within days of them falling.

Elsewhere, big messes lurk.

Trees went down all over the Kootenai National Forest. LaRona Rebo, a Kootenai forest spokesperson, said in an email that there are numerous patches of downed trees on the Bear, Libby, Quartz and Flower creek drainages near Libby. In the Eureka area, Rebo said trees have "heavily impacted" the road system. Salvage sales are being planned near Troy, and more could be coming.

Victoria Wilkins, a spokesperson for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, said there's significant damage in creek drainages near Leavenworth, Lake Chelan, Mazama and Twisp, and that crews are still assessing the damage.

Crews are already working to get roads cleared and reopened in some places.

Forest Service sawyers worked on the St. Joe River Road upstream of Avery earlier this month. An excavator and a crew of sawyers worked this week on the Bear Creek Road in the Kootenai National Forest near Libby - a popular access point for the Cabinet Mountains. The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest in Idaho said this week that crews have started dealing with blowdown on the North Fork Road, which accesses the North Fork Clearwater River.

Washouts and other damage that requires more than clearing trees will take longer to fix.

"For a lot of these closures, we don't actually have a good sense of when things are going to be able to get reopened," said Jen Gradisher, the trails program manager for the Washington Trails Association.

Closed roads could disrupt some of WTA's annual trail maintenance work - a trail can't be cleared or repaired if no one can get to it. Other projects are hampered by damage to places WTA typically uses as a base camp for work trips, such as Holden Village on Lake Chelan.

A year ago, money was the problem. Federal budget cuts limited the amount of work WTA could get done, Gradisher said. Funding looks better this year and, despite road closures and other challenges, the group still has a full schedule of projects for the coming season.

"We are trying to go to as many places as we can," she said.

Barbara Sammut, the North Idaho program manager for the Idaho Trails Association, said the group has three dozen projects planned for the Panhandle - double what they did last year.

Road damage has forced schedule changes. She said work in the Saint Joe drainage was pushed back by a month because of boulders that fell on the main river road.

Blowdown means crews will do more sawing this year. In places that haven't been logged out for years, this winter's blowdown only adds trees to an existing problem. Sammut knows of one area like that near the Magee Ranger's Cabin in the upper portion of the Coeur d'Alene River drainage.

"They already had about 1,000 trees per mile," she said. "We're expecting it to be worse than that."

Sammut's group has already been at work this season, with a "strike team" that was sent to help clear timber at English Point after the first round of windstorms. After the second round, however, the Forest Service began planning a salvage timber sale there - a way to have a logging company do the work and turn blowdown into cash.

Patrick Lair, a spokesman for the Idaho Panhandle forest, said two other salvage sales are being planned, including one south of Avery that officials expect to consist of about 10 million board feet of timber.

Jerman, the silviculturist, said other salvage projects are likely to be announced as the agency identifies spots with a high concentration of marketable timber that can be packaged into a sale.

The agency's focus is areas with existing timber sales and places deemed high priorities for public access, Jerman said. They won't hit every corner of the forest, and he wants people to be prepared for that reality.

"Trails are liable to have a lot of wood down on them. Roads that they are normally accustomed to driving may have a lot of trees down on them," he said. "It's going to be more challenging just to try to recreate this year."

Forest Service staffers are also still learning of places with major blowdown or flooding problems. Jerman said one crew recently drove the road to the Settler's Grove of Ancient Cedars, which they knew was washed out at a certain point. Before they hit the washout, they counted more than 300 downed trees.

As for beyond the washout, it's anyone's guess.

"Being able to physically get out onto the ground, into the woods has been awful," Jerman said. "It's still going to be a bit of time and discovery finding the amount of damage."

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